I recently realized, to my great embarrassment, that all of my favorite writers were men. What's more is all of my favorite books are by men. Some of them were of course gay, but I doubt that that should make any difference in terms of gender--although curiously a character in Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince," Francis Marlowe, suspects all writers of being homosexual.
Along with Jane Austen, Iris Murdoch is one of those writers that I will probably soon revisit. "The Black Prince" struck as a fairly excellent dramatic novel, situated, in modern terms, equidistantly from Martin Amis' "The Information" and Nabokov's "Lolita." It features the academic and literary envy that is the theme of the former and the forbidden romance of the latter, although handled very differently, along with the question of the unreliable narrator.
A plot synopsis: Bradley Pearson narrates his (is it a spoiler to say) downfall in a flurry of events populated by his chronically depressed sister Priscilla, his best friend and rival Arnold Baffin, his wife Rachel, their significant young (but not Lolita-young) daughter Julian, Francis Marlowe, Bradley's ex-wife Christian...Martin Amis noted once, in a review, that Murdoch has a tendency toward gender-confused names. As this is my first Murdoch novel I very much noticed it, but it is an enjoyable curio. I am dodging here the bigger questions of the novel.
The unreliable narrator conceit is deftly employed here, and is perhaps the best example of the trope that I can think of in its effectiveness. The novel opens with two prefaces and ends with...I don't know, four afterwords, from the ranks of the novel's dramatis personae, that cast a different light immediately on the last crucial event of the story and then a pall over the entire story itself. Rather than feeling tacked on or obnoxious as these things sometimes can be, the device here highlights the failings of the protagonist in a way that does not seem cruel or arbitrary. It is not a "twist," but a postscript that sheds more light on what the reader has already suspected.
"Hamlet" figures into the plot as well in a way that leaves me somewhat baffled--but in a good way. Throughout the middle of the story Bradley Pearson schools young Julian on what is Shakespeare's best play (but not my favorite. coughmacbethcough) and, as a sometimes clumsy young academic, my first thought was to see the novel as a recreation of the events. This reading does not work for five minutes. I wondered variously if Hamlet was Bradley or Julian and outside of Rachel as Gertrude and Priscilla as, I guess, Ophelia--well, eventually that falls apart. A stupid argument. But, in taking the themes of "Hamlet"--there is more. I think. My familiarity with "Hamlet" gets dusty with every day that passes where I don't read the "What a piece of work is a man!" speech. A favorite of mine, that one.
The point is that the novel, in every aspect, is clearly textually rich. Five readings, probably, could suffice to understand it; if I get around to it I may take advantage of the college library servers to seek out academic critiques, which these days for me feel like cheating. On the other hand, I recently read "Gravity's Rainbow," and no number of essays, summaries or reviews can make sense of that.
I will one day read more Iris Murdoch. Possibly soon; possibly before I pick up Jane Austen again. Shit, and she's pretty too (although Raymond Chandler's wife Cissy is still my number one if-only-I-had-been-born-a-hundred-years-ago crush).
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